s Fall / Winter 06 07 - Steidl
s Fall / Winter 06 07 - Steidl
s Fall / Winter 06 07 - Steidl
Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
126<br />
David Parker<br />
Sirens<br />
“Then all at once the wind fell, and a calm came over all of the sea, as though some power lulled the swell.”<br />
Homer. The Odyssey<br />
When Odysseus instructed his crew to lash him to the mast of their ship, he was preparing himself to hear the sirens’<br />
song, ‘the song of the universe’. Their sweet singing, claims of omniscience and power to calm the waters, unfailingly<br />
lured sailors off course to their destruction. Odysseus plugged his crew’s ears with beeswax, so that he alone could<br />
savour the seductive laments of the sirens and experience a mystical encounter with the sublime.<br />
Dreams and the sea are the closest we come to other worlds, and the solitary sea-stacks that David Parker has<br />
photographed, or sirens, as they appear to him, stand as guardians on the threshold of both worlds. For Parker the<br />
sirens’ song is a call to contemplation, not action, and these images chart his fascinated encounters with an enchanted<br />
world of forgotten archetypes. His pictures are intended, siren-like, to lure the viewer into a mysterious abstract world,<br />
both concrete and ineffable.<br />
Myths and legends have often been inspired and shaped by geologic landforms and similarly, David Parker uses the<br />
natural world as an arena for the personal exploration of mythic, symbolic and metaphoric motifs, a theme which he<br />
previously developed in The Phenomenal World (an award winning book published by Edition 7L in 2000).<br />
Ultimately the sirens song is the song of art, “which charms and fascinates us into the ego-diminishing state of<br />
aesthetic enchantment, perhaps the goal and consolation of all art”.<br />
David Parker was born in 1949 in England and was trained as an engineer and illustrator, before moving into<br />
photography. He has published two monographs, and continues to make his own large scale toned silver-gelatine<br />
prints.<br />
Exhibitions: Robert Koch Gallery, September – November, 20<strong>06</strong>, Michael Hoppen Gallery, October – December, 20<strong>06</strong><br />
David Parker<br />
Sirens<br />
With an essay by Marina Warner<br />
Book design by David Parker<br />
92 pages with 38 quadrotone plates<br />
16.5 x 11.25 in. / 42 x 28.5 cm<br />
Clothbound hardcover<br />
US $ 85.00 / £ 48.00 / R 70.00<br />
ISBN 3-86521-3<strong>06</strong>-5<br />
ISBN-13 978-3-86521-3<strong>06</strong>-8<br />
127
Change language